One is on the breast and clings there with arms, and one on the back and clings with thongs. The burden of the back bows the body, turns the face from the sky, narrows the lungs and flattens the foot;takes away the flight and the dance from the gait of man, and ties him towards the earth--not only in the way of nature, by means of his arched feet, but by a heavy lien upon his shoulders and his brows. It is the fardel that makes this vital figure to be subject visibly, and at several points, to that law of gravitation which, in a state of liberty, it uses to withstand, to countervail, to leap from, to walk with, making the universal tether elastic. Bend in two this supple spine that can lift itself, like a snake erect, with something better than mere balance--with life and the active will;bend the back, and at once gravitation takes hold of the loins and grasps the knees, and pulls upon the shoulders, and the neck feels the weight of an abject head.
Wherever women are told off to hard open-air labour, we shall find among them a lower class of their own kind--poorer where all are poor, and straining at their task where all are labouring--who walk the dust with burdens on their backs. Loads of field-labour are these, or of the labour in a fishing-port, and large in proportion to their weight; too large to be bound close and carried on the head, too wide to be borne on the shoulder, too unwieldy for the clasp of arms. Among American Indians, we are told, the women carry the tent so, and the gear of a demenagement, and the warrior himself, upon his goods, not seldom. In the agriculture of the European Continent the women carry the large loads thus, the refuse is laid upon them, and all that is bound up for burning; they are the gleaners, not of wheat but of tares. Or they carry fodder for the imprisoned cattle, disappearing as they walk, bowed, quenched, hooded, and hidden with hay.
Women who bear this load do not prosper. They have a downward look, albeit not as conspirators; and in them the earth carries a burden like their own, or but little more buoyant. Stones off the face of the stony fields, huge sheaves of stalks and husks after granaries are filled, fuel and forage--bent from the stature of women, those who bear those bundles go near the earth that gave them, and breathe her dust.
